The syn­er­gies of Le Havre, Rouen and Paris ports pro­vide end-to-end mul­ti­modal lo­gis­tics so­lu­tions and make avail­able seam­less con­nec­tiv­ity for mar­itime trade be­tween In­dia and the Euro­pean coun­tries. In an in­ter­view, Herve Cornede, Direc­tor-Com­mer­cial an

QTell us about the con­cept of ‘HAROPA’ and your rea­sons for com­ing to In­dia.

HAROPA en­com­passes three main ports. One of them is the largest con­tainer port of Le Havre, the sec­ond be­ing the num­ber-one break bulk port of France, Rouen and the third be­ing the big­gest lo­gis­tics hub of Paris.

HAROPA is a very new con­cept in Europe that not only buys the syn­er­gies of three very large cargo sys­tems in the Nor­mandy re­gion along the river Seine but also con­nects a very large industrial hin­ter­land of Nor­mandy. As most of the cargo is des­tined to Paris ports, there is a wa­ter­way con­nec­tion to reach all the places where the ports are lo­cated and also there is a very ef­fi­cient rail­way sys­tem as well as the road sys­tem. So, by virtue of this, they are able to pro­vide per­fect lo­gis­tics so­lu­tions in terms of deep­draught ports.

Le Havre is the first port in Europe at the mouth of English Chan­nel and lo­cated on the north west of French coast. An ad­van­tage that Le Havre as a port has is that they can han­dle the big­gest ves­sels to the ex­tent of 18,000 TEUs due to its deep-draught fa­cil­i­ties.

Changes in traf­fic with In­dia are in­creas­ing by 20 per cent. In a way, the In­dian mar­ket is in­creas­ing a lot, with top In­dian ex­ports be­ing tex­tiles, gar­ments, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, etc. Be­sides us­ing the fa­cil­i­ties of Haropa, the Gov­ern­ment should also look at op­er­a­tions in other ar­eas of Haropa in In­dia.

QWhat are the added ad­van­tages which ship­ping lines can get from HAROPA?

The first ad­van­tage they can have is that this port pro­vides the fastest tran­sit time. Con­sid­er­ing its ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tion in Europe, this port has multi-fa­cil­i­ties. Its cost and time ad­van­tages com­pared with its coun­ter­parts are al­ready en­abling In­dian ex­porters to move to the next level with in­creased co­op­er­a­tion be­tween cargo com­mu­ni­ties from both sides.

In terms of tran­ship­ment, we are very well lo­cated; we are re­ceiv­ing more and more tran­ship­ments to UK, Ire­land, Scot­land and of­ten Spain, Por­tu­gal and the Baltic re­gion. HAROPA is con­nected by all three modes of trans­port with 125 weekly ser­vices to all over Europe. The big lo­gis­tics zone along the same river al­lows us to be 30 per cent more cost com­pet­i­tive. The big­gest ad­van­tage is the con­ges­tion-free road ac­cess and ex­cel­lent rail con­nec­tiv­ity when cargo is moved to the hin­ter­land. Apart from that, the cus­toms in HAROPA are set­ting bench­marks for cus­toms of other coun­tries to fol­low.

QHow do you look for­ward to do­ing busi­ness with In­dian cus­tomers?

We are look­ing for­ward to more cargo and ser­vices to cus­tomers. Also, along­side we are work­ing a lot on in­fra­struc­ture from crane to rail barge to in­land wa­ter­ways and VIT equip­ments be­cause un­less we are able to clear the goods within five min­utes, there are im­mense chal­lenges that have to be faced be­cause of the con­ges­tion.

QWhat

are the fu­ture plans of HAROPA?

We have in­vested in one big mul­ti­modal plat­form which will open in few weeks. For us it was a big in­vest­ment to the ex­tent of € 40 mil­lion. We are work­ing on IT so­lu­tions; we be­ing an old port are con­nected and have a semi-IT sys­tem. So, it’s a kind of sin­gle win­dow for ex­porters, im­porters, for­warders and ship­ping com­pa­nies. We are try­ing to de­velop ser­vices that can be used to trans­port goods with the help of wa­ter­ways and con­trib­ute to an ef­fi­cient lo­gis­tics sys­tem.

QHow

does HAROPA plan to strengthen its rank in world con­tainer trade?

We be­lieve that the eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion in Europe will re­cover; we need a lit­tle bit in­crease. Last year, we had a very flat in­crease; roughly we grew by nine per cent, but this year we grew by only five per cent. The HAROPA sys­tem is roughly 30 per cent cheaper for In­dian ex­ports than its Euro­pean coun­ter­parts; so in a way we at­tract more and more In­dian ex­porters and af­ter that we dis­trib­ute be­cause we have our regular feeder ser­vices.